The Great Silence

The Great Silence
Italian film poster by Giuliano Nistri
Italian	Il grande silenzio
Directed by	Sergio Corbucci
Screenplay by	Vittoriano Petrilli Mario Amendola Bruno Corbucci Sergio Corbucci
Story by	Sergio Corbucci
Produced by	Attilio Riccio Robert Dorfmann
Starring	Jean Louis Trintignant Klaus Kinski Frank Wolff Luigi Pistilli Mario Brega Marisa Merlini Vonetta McGee
Cinematography	Silvano Ippoliti
Edited by	Amedeo Salfa
Music by	Ennio Morricone
Production companies	Adelphia Compagnia Cinematografica Les Films Corona
Distributed by	20th Century Fox (Italy) Les Films Corona (France)
Release dates	November 1968 (1968-11) (Italy) 27 January 1969 (1969-01-27) (France)
Running time	105 minutes
Countries	Italy France[1]
Languages	Italian English
Box office	₤309 million (Italy)[2] 570,486 admissions (France)[3][unreliable source?] $53,074 (US re-release)[4]

The Great Silence (Italian: Il grande silenzio) is a 1968 revisionist spaghetti Western film directed and co-written by Sergio Corbucci. An Italian-French co-production, the film stars Jean-Louis Trintignant, Klaus Kinski, Vonetta McGee (in her film début) and Frank Wolff, with Luigi Pistilli, Mario Brega, Marisa Merlini and Carlo D'Angelo in supporting roles.

Conceived by Corbucci as a politically-charged allegory inspired by the deaths of Che Guevara and Malcolm X, the film's plot takes place in Utah prior to the Great Blizzard of 1899. It pits a mute gunslinger (Trintignant), fighting in the defence of a group of outlaws and a vengeful young widow (McGee), against a group of ruthless bounty killers led by "Loco" (Kinski) and the corrupt banker Henry Pollicut (Pistilli). Unlike most films of the genre, which were filmed in the Almería province of Spain to double for areas such as Texas and Mexico, The Great Silence was primarily filmed on location in the Italian Dolomites.

Distributed in most territories by 20th Century Fox, The Great Silence was theatrically released to a mediocre commercial reception in Italy, but it fared better in other countries. Controversial for its bleak and dark tone, the film's reputation grew, and it gained a cult following in the wake of its release. The film was withheld from release in the United States until 2001, when it was made available on DVD by Fantoma Films and Image Entertainment; in Britain, it was first shown in 1990 on the BBC2 program Moviedrome.

Having received several theatrical re-releases, most notably in 2012 and 2017, The Great Silence is now widely regarded by fans and authorities on Spaghetti Westerns as one of the greatest films of the genre, and is acknowledged as Corbucci's masterpiece. Praise has gone to the acting, the utilization of snowbound landscapes, Ennio Morricone's score, and the film's subversion of several conventions of the Western film genre. Retrospective critics and scholars of Corbucci's Westerns have also deemed The Great Silence to be the second film in the director's "Mud and Blood" trilogy, which also includes Django (1966) and The Specialists (1969).^[5]